Dream Digital Art Setup on a Budget

I’ve got the Huion Kamvas 24 Pro (4K). It is really good, even though I would have liked a bit more brightness. But still good. Though you need a big desk 🤣😂

The iPad was my dream setup lol

My daughter is 10 and is really interested in digital art. I'm just afraid Ill pay a ton of money for something she may not use after a while. Would a tablet be best choice ? Any suggestions ?

I'm planning to buy a pen display and I'm wondering if 1080p is enough in 16" display. My budget now is around 350$ which is exactly the price of Huion Kamvas 16, but maybe i should wait and go for at least 2.5k? How does 1080p really feel? I want a hardware that will serve me for years and will be pleasant to use. I paint mostly landscapes and portraits

What happened to 2k graphic displays? 4K is very premium, but your laptop needs more power! You need to drop a clean $1000 on you computer. Are we looking for top end alternatives at the $2000 budget? Since Huion and XPPen are close competitors, I think you could definitely play in either pool and get great rigs.

I have an XP Pen Artist 24 Pro and it currently sells for $675! That gives you room for either a Dell XPS 14 or a MacBook Air. If you work with that, you can upgrade later to a 4K graphic display and sell the XP Pen display if you so choose.

This is pretty useful

My dream set-up is definitely a laptop with a touch screen and wacom (the non-screen one though)

You could save a lot of money on that last one if you go with the 256GB MacMini and just buy a 256GB USB 3.0 flash drive. SanDisk has one for $20. You could literally buy 10 for the price difference of cheap MacMini to mid MacMini. Flash drives don't have the throughput that a SSD has but you only actually access the drive when loading or saving files, the rest of the time you're running from RAM so you would see next to no performance loss.

I'm actually weighing this right now. The hardware chosen here is fine for a budget, but I would say it's better to get something with a discreet GPU rather than 16gb RAM, so I'm watching the Acer Nitro 5, Asus Tuf gaming and Lenovo IdeaPad gaming 3s to see when the prices drop. A 32gb kit of DDR4 for laptop is only about $60 so it's a huge money saver... I promise, opening your laptop isn't as scary as you think it is! Just DON'T buy a laptop with LP DDR (which is soldered, not socketed, thus, not upgradeable). You also want to try to get something that doesn't have a U-series CPU (e.g. i7-1265u, the "u" denotes it's a low voltage CPU, which is great for battery life, but thin on power. If this is your main workstation, trust me, plug it in and make peace with the fact you can only work on battery for about 2 hours). An H-series i5 will generally net you better performance than a u-series i7, which is why even entry level gaming laptops are plenty powerful enough.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents, maybe you actually need the battery life of a u-series CPU or you're too nervous to take the screwdriver to your new computer (all joking aside, that's totally reasonable, even if I do promise it's easier than you think) then the options in the video are totally good ones!

I do my art on the back pages of my school notebooks... doesn't cost me a penny.

My Dream setup includes XP PEN Artist 16 pro gen 2 with a gaming PC with Ryzen 5-7 5000

Just a heads up, apple overprices their storage upgrades, only get them if youre going for the higher RAM option. Instead of paying + €200 for another 256GB of ssd, you can spend ~€70-80 for an external ssd of 1TB, and with those high speed usb c ports and modern SSD technology, it will be fast enough not to notice a difference while drawing

The huion 16 inch one, if paired with usb-c cable in my desktop, do I still need a power adapter?

Incredibly interesting video!
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Looking forward to your s9 ultra review ! nice vid as always man.

I'm noticing that alot of folks lean towards Mac products for art. I tend to favor android and windows

What is a good ipad equivalent for Android os?

Guys this is all great. In my case, to start at least with But even $ 1000 is very difficult to find and earn. Nobody buys drawings on paper. It's been a year since no one bought even one painting Xiaomi 6 Xiaomi pen 2.

easy brad ipad pro 512gb 2nd gen apple pencil folio keyboard done

The most incredible thing is that here in Brazil the cheapest is very out of the financial reality of many people, I've been waiting since last year for a good promotion to buy in installments and upgrade my work as a digital artist and UX/UI Designer at work from my University.

For 500$,, just built a pc and buy a pen table

I upgraded from a first gen Apple Pencil and iPad to a iPad mini 6th gen with Apple Pencil gen 2. As a hobby artist I am extremely happy with what my 6th gen iPad mini and Apple Pencil gen 2 provides.

I make comics (so a lot of high-res .psd files) and I've been rocking a 9-year-old PC with a 128 GB hard drive. One 200-ish page graphic novel winds up about 20 GB of space when all is said and done (because I'm paranoid and store multiple versions of my files). I don't think storage is necessary for drawing, because external hard drives and cloud storage are super cheap AND serve as protection against data loss.

For my dream set-up, I pretty much already have it? I don't remember the specs anymore but I have an old gaming rig (powerful at the time, so it's still able to keep up, though it is starting to get a lil' slow), a BenQ monitor that comes with multiple gamuts (and a B&W option) - and a newer Intuos Pro. Together with my (stupid expensive, but so very worth it) ergo chair and a stand for the Intuos, they make for pretty nice ergonomic arrangement. I would like to add a Cintiq and an ergo arm to the mix when I can. I also have a travel-friendly set in an iPad mini with Apple pencil and folio case + a logitech k380 keyboard (super cheap, extremely durable). If I had to build it from scratch on a specific budget, I second what other people are saying and would just buy a used "old" gaming PC + the best Wacom drawing monitor I could afford with what was left (unless all I could afford is the Wacom One, in which case we're buying a monitor and a used Intuos Pro).

Does the Huion Kanvas 16 come with all the cables and things needed to draw with or is it sold
separately?

a used pc and screenless tablet is the most versatile option you can do everything on it drawing, gaming, animation. with unlimited space unlike I pad

Never get a 8gb windows computer, its a waste of money.
By getting 16gbs of ram you can do so much more at the same time.

Think of listening to music, talking/chatting online with friends, listening to musics, having (too many) references open in your browser.

Also, a Mac is a personal computer, just like windows.
But Mac's have better memory management due to their own operating system.

Brad, can you please do an in depth tutorial on HI Paint for Android?? Just to help new artists navigate the menus and tools like Procreate without having that app

I have a question for the wacom one can the wacom one connect with the Huawei p30 pro (pls someone answer)

Etched Wacom glass for my eyes is awful, not only Wacom, any of them. Its "dirty and blurry". Warn anybody check with your eyes before any purchaise!

Why didn't you put the Samsung tab s8

Can't you just buy the 500$ 22in pen display from xp pen then use the rest of the $2,000 to build a PC

Love the video. Side note since you were showcasing a lot of Bestbuy stuff. Don't sleep on their open box items. You can easily save a couple hundred dollars and a lot of them are basically brand new. They still have the same return and warranty as regular item, all that means is that someone got it and returned it. Also the "condition" is often misleading. Ask to see the lowest condition since it's even cheaper, the employees will let you check it out in most cases. The website description of "fair" makes it sound like it's horrible but I used to work at GeekSquad and we sometimes marked it that low just because and it still had sealed charger and wrapping. Just worth it on a budget.

Love this vid topic

I work for many years with an iPad Pro 12"3+ Pencil. As a pro illustrator I don't need anything else to create. For Preprint I still use a laptop with Photoshop. But that's it. Now I just can't imagine working with a Wacom or a Huion and be stuck on a desk with it.

Piece of advice you can buy other mini pcs with comparable performance to M2 and avoid the 4k scaling issue on macOS with that pen display and you can buy an arm for the screen that way. Also, if you want the mac mini just buy the basic one and upgrade the ram to 16 it is better in the lomg run as you can buy a docking base for mav mini that has a slot for an NVMe SSD but ram cannot be uograded

u wanna pick galaxy tab s9 ultra over ur 1000$ set up ?

I would go:
>Mac mini M2 16gb RAM 256GB SSD 799$
>Kingston SSD NV2 1tb + Housing to make it external drive $60~
>Huion Kamvas pro 24 $749
>Razer Tartarus Pro Gaming Keypad $150

Total is around $1758~

I think it's a better option to stick ram upgrade instead of storage because the drawing softwares use a lot of ram, you can store basically anything in external SSD, even if it were a windows option, to me rather prefer an M2 because power efficiency, a laptop requires a lot of energy and at the end of the month the bill we quite high, when I'm solely working I prefer use mac because of power consumption and even at this price point maybe I consider an iPad Pro 12.9 M2 + Apple Pencil because there is clip studio paint which is the software I use to work, thankfully iPads tent to be long-lived devices and still is on the price range

I think it's better to get a good desktop before buying a cheap laptop in all those settings. If you build it yourself you may find a desktop for around 400~600 USD that is better than a laptop twice the price.

Galaxy Tab S8 ships with 8GB RAM that should last for a while.

Brad, you're so precious, scouring Best Buy's website and expecting to actually find "the BEST buy." 😏😅

would you recommend getting samsung tab s8 with a pencil or ipad air 5th with a pencil if they are priced the same ?

it's a shame. THis kinda budget only works for people in the US

I just recently picked up a huion 16 2021 refirb for $220 and a MSI creator z16 last year model for 1300. The pc is a powerhouse and display is more then i need for what i do. I Loving it so far. When on a budget it always helps to go with previous years models.

$2000 dollar budget, I would 100% go with the same Huion but would build my own PC to spec. if I didn’t want to go with the laptop… I love Apple devices, but their pricing on the mini is insane for the spec increases

Got a Samsung galaxy book2 pro 360 13" refurbed at Best Buy for $800 and a xencelabs quick keys remote for $99. Pretty portable, good pen response, and the remote allows me to flip the screen and lay it flat or angle it with my 3D printed stand. This would be in the 1000 dollar budget. The Samsung has 16GB memory, and a 500GB hard drive. Lenovo and Asus both have laptops that are pen friendly too. It not only allows me to do design work, but can also run my fabrication machines (laser cutter, 3D printers, and CNC machine).

Brad, you can build a PC with 32 gigabytes of RAM, a 12th-generation intel processor and a 3060 video card with 12 GB for $ 700. A good alternative to the mac mini and there is an opportunity to play games. And it is also possible to activate the 10-bit color depth mode, which is supported by the Huion monitor.

Please review the Asus vivobook 14 flip

I have worked on iPads, smaller tablets and screen tablets for years. They did what they had to do until this point. Now I’m an animator an iPad doesn’t cut it, even an iPad Pro crashes constantly. I find the screen less tablets take too long for workflow and the smaller screen tablets not big enough to show the screen and all of the buttons and widgets.

So finding a large enough screen tablet that’s affordable for the type of work I do has been an absolute nightmare so I really appreciate this video.

If size matters for a cheap set-up. I recommend the S7 FE. Just avoid the 5g model and base storage/ram configuration. The S9 FE's are around the corner though. If they are 120hz it'd be hard to beat for drawing.

Whydon't the manufacturer's supply a tablet thta has everything and that you don't have to run around buying add on's that should already come with the main unit ?